Abstract

The authors present polyimide amplified piezoelectric bimorph scanning mirrors for application in optical coherence tomography(oct). These devices use piezoelectric bimorph actuators to drive microfabricated polyimide structures at resonance. These devices have tilting tables (either 1.125 or wide) that tilt on thick torsion hinges to amplify the motion of the bimorph actuators and produce large scan ranges. These devices have been integrated into the scanning arm of a spectral domain OCTimaging system. Preliminary in vivo images have been obtained with scans of 40°–50° at real-time imaging rates of .

Received 24 May 2006Accepted 18 November 2006Published online 26 December 2006

Acknowledgments:

This work was supported in part by funding provided by The George Washington Institute of Biomedical Engineering. In addition, the authors gratefully acknowledge Stephen Smith from the Biomedical Engineering Department at Duke University for his assistance in the fabrication of the polyimide scanning mirror devices.